Growing up in Fort McMurray in the 1980s, Laura Whalen braved enormous mosquitoes to stay up late and watch the northern lights, which she recalls as “a glorious display of dancing colours in the sky — truly a symphony of light and sound.”
These days, the lyric soprano, now based out of Toronto, is living that very metaphor with a musical career that swirls from opera house to symphony hall to recording stage. One week, she’s the doomed courtesan in Verdi’s La Traviata, a role that recently brought her back to Edmonton, an old stomping ground; next, she’s the centrepiece of Lehar’s frothy operetta, The Merry Widow, which she performs in Kitchener-Waterloo this month; then, in June, she’ll spend a few nights in a spectacular concert hall as a concert soloist with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in Orff’s Carmina Burana.
“Laura has the ability to go as far as she wants,” says John Estacio, an award-winning composer based in Edmonton, who co-wrote two operas in which Whalen premiered in the leading female roles.
“She has the tools: the voice, the work ethic, the brain and the capability,” praises Estacio. “When you have that complete package, it’s really up to you to figure out how far you want to go. The huge international superstar career — I think it’s at Laura’s fingertips if she wants it.”
Superstardom certainly wasn’t part of the scenario in her early Fort McMurray days. Whalen moved there from Labrador City as a six-year-old (her parents each spent 20-plus years at Syncrude). Fort McMurray, she recalls, was “an extraordinary place, now I look back — in the middle of nowhere, freezing cold and all these oil companies. Thirty minutes out of the city, there was another whole city of steel and trucks and mountains of piping.”
She credits her sixth-grade school music teacher, Mrs. Olin, with encouraging a shy young soprano who had no musical background to open her mouth and sing. Wins at the local Rotary Club music festivals and private lessons followed, and soon, her new choice of career blossomed. “I had good success, and had people in that community telling me I should study full time,” says Whalen on the phone from New York City, where she’s on a three-week whirl of voice lessons and coaching, auditioning for some major U.S. companies and catching live operas in between.
After moving to Victoria to get her music degree, Whalen auditioned for the University of Toronto’s prestigious opera school. She enrolled a year later, “working her tail off” through the program and earning a boost from well-known Canadian conductor Mario Bernardi, who set her career on its upward trajectory with the first few engagements.
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